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At the final session of the 2022 Literacy Research Association Conference, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Marcus Croom, Mary McVee, and Allison Skerrett presented critical work related to equity, representation, and race in literacy scholarship. Panelists shared concerns and pursued a shared goal. Specifically, as literacy scholars, they recognized that like the empirical research conducted in classrooms and communities, review scholarship--scholarship that aspires to make sense of large bodies of available research--is always subject to systemic biases, privileging, and racism. In this panel session, we intentionally sought to dismantle biases through four review-oriented projects that--each in its own way--attempts to counter the systemic whitewashing that has characterized review scholarship in literacy.

In response to the increasing importance of a college education, this study investigates the college access trajectories of targeted racial and linguistic minority students and recommends ways to promote their college access. High school completers drawn from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics were tracked for eight years, and a series of discrete-time survival analyses was conducted. The results revealed significantly lower college access rates for racial and linguistic minority students than for comparable White English-speaking students. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access and ICT use for educational purposes were identified as potential ways to support college access for racial and linguistic minority students.

Given the increased attention on pre-college engineering education and its disciplinary nature pertaining to language, discourses, and communicative practices, this "state-of-the-art literature review" focused on findings of research articles informed by qualitative and quantitative data to foreground communicative literacies within engineering design teams at the pre-college level. A disciplinary literacies framework was used to interpret and analyze published works in this particular domain. A search, selection, and inclusion process typical for state-of-the-art reviews yielded 33 studies. Constant comparison and open-coding led to clustering studies under five overarching themes in ranked order of frequency of occurrence pertaining to: (1) engineering disciplinary communicative literacies in practice; (2) matters of access with populations underrepresented in engineering; (3) learning STEM content through engineering design; (4) affective responses to uncertainty and risk in engineering design; and (5) evaluating the quality of collaboration. With respect to the themes, we discuss possibilities of using literacy frameworks to deepen theoretical and methodological insights into the study of phenomena related to within-group communicative literacies in K-12 engineering spaces.

Many immigrants and refugees in the United States must confront different linguistic and cultural contexts in their everyday life. As part of a larger ethnographic study related to refugee families and literacy, this qualitative study explores how adult English as a second language (ESL) students help their classmate Htoo Eh find ways to deal with an everyday life challenge. This study utilized two supporting theoretical frameworks: funds of knowledge and literacy as a social practice. Data sources included field notes, transcripts of video recording, artifacts, as well as conservations with the teacher and welfare coordinators. Findings demonstrate that community members utilized two funds of knowledge in particular: social network and life experience to help the focal participant. Findings also showed that adult ESL students assisted their classmates in developing three types of literacies, which were finding and obtaining childcare, knowing how the system works, and communicating with the caseworker in order to deal with an everyday life challenge. These findings suggest that educators should recognize and value adult ESL learners' funds of knowledge as well as incorporate the knowledge into instruction. Educators also should open up space for these learners to develop literacies together as a community.

Educational policies seek to integrate engineering instruction within elementary school settings. This becomes challenging for elementary school leaders and teachers, as few have previous teacher preparation or professional development experience with engineering content or processes. Although studies have considered teacher identity in relation to new teachers' experiences teaching unfamiliar STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content, few consider the experiences of veteran teachers, especially regarding teaching of engineering. Utilizing the lenses of brokering and boundary crossing, this 2-year interpretive case study explores the ways in which 3 veteran teachers reflected on teaching engineering and the engineering design process in a newly formed after-school elementary engineering club. Teachers' reflections elucidate how they mediated their experiences in becoming familiar with new engineering content by navigating boundary crossing and drawing from and expanding on their teacher identities while enacting real-world practices of teaching and working with children.

This article describes findings across two separate teacher education studies that analyse pre-service and in-service teachers' explorations of literacy and diversity through literature discussion and peer interaction. Using the notion of "storylines" in positioning theory, the authors analyse particular storylines they construct within, and across, participants. Findings conclude that these storylines, as revealed through positioning theory, provide a needed alternative to merely labeling teachers as "resistant" to multicultural explorations. The authors discuss how we, as teacher educators, must (1) position ourselves to avoid characterizing pre- and in-service teachers from a deficit perspective, and (2) engage in thoughtful reflective practice to explore ways to teach the students we struggle to reach.

As part of an ongoing research collaboration with university-based researchers, Nancy and her teaching partner, Meredith, implemented a loosely defined system of portfolios to supplement the other forms of assessment in their classroom. School-based and university-based researchers interviewed children to assess children's perspectives of their growth and progress. Situated within this larger study, the primary focus of this article is to present a sociolinguistic analysis of talk between one English language learner, Unesha, and her ESL teacher, Nancy, as they discuss Unesha's written artifacts collected within her portfolio. Using methods from discourse analysis, the authors focus on a narrow segment of transcript to demonstrate the various discourse strategies Nancy uses to help Unesha explore and articulate her understanding of her growth and progress in relation to written artifacts. The intent of this analysis is to help provide insights for other teachers and researchers who wish to explore how discourse strategies may scaffold a student's reflection and to provide insight into the challenges posed to teachers as they attempt to engage students in self-reflection around their work. Through a close reading of the transcribed interactions, the authors emphasize how the discussion affords an opportunity for the teacher Nancy to listen carefully to the student Unesha in order to discover what Unesha knows and to scaffold Unesha's explorations so that Unesha may talk in meaningful ways about her work. (Contains 1 table.)

Researchers have demonstrated that tutoring is an effective instructional model that relies upon the relationships among the tutor, the tutee, and the curriculum and not merely instructional skills or strategies. In our microethnographic case study, we investigated interactional patterns of two tutors who were pre-service literacy teachers working individually with Andy, a first-grade student, in a university reading center. Through deductive coding of 225 minutes of tutoring video, the researchers found that ingrained tutoring scripts and metaphors for learning adversely impacted the instructional relationships between the tutors and Andy. Scripts and metaphors limited the enacted behaviors of the tutee and the tutors since a pursuit of right answers dominated their work together. This, in turn, resulted in many missed opportunities for Andy to make substantial contributions to the tutoring interactions.

This conceptual article addresses the question: What are the disciplinary literacy practices surrounding the Engineering Design Process (EDP) at the elementary level? Recent attention has focused on developing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills for U.S. students. In the United States, the Next Generation Science Standards and reforms such as Common Core State Standards have drawn increased attention to relationships between language, literacy, and subject matter content often referred to as disciplinary literacy. In this conceptual article, we argue that literacy educators can make a substantial contribution to the study of engineering education, particularly for underrepresented minorities and girls. We first provide a brief overview of disciplinary literacies. Then, using examples from a research-based after-school club, we explore how disciplinary literacies might contribute to the study of engineering and EDP in elementary settings particularly in relation to: (a) productive communication, (b) vocabulary development, and (c) identity.

Situated in an elementary afterschool Engineering Literacies Club framed around multiliteracies and the engineering design process, this article explores engineering habits of mind and disciplinary literacies. Disciplinary literacies encourage students to read, write, think, and act like historians, mathematicians, scientists, or engineers by engaging in habits of mind. Drawing from the Royal Academy of Engineering's framework for engineering habits of mind (EHoM), this exploratory case study considers: What emergent EHoM do students demonstrate within the engineering design process (EDP)? What does this reveal about how EHoM can be used by teachers as a lens for teaching disciplinary literacies? Study findings demonstrated emergent EHoM are enacted synergistically and through multiple modes of communication (i.e. multimodality). EHoM were demonstrated by students in varying degrees reflecting the engineering design process and students' own proficiencies (or lack of proficiencies) regarding engineering. Enactment of EHoM was also influenced by teachers who scaffold learners' development of engineering literacies through problem scoping, problem-solving, collaboration, improving, and testing. The authors propose EHoM as a lens could provide an accessible way for teachers to integrate disciplinary literacies when teaching engineering with particular emphasis on how students can think and act like engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual article, based on data collected and analyzed within a larger study, considers perspectives on cultural diversity and research in the context of the current politicized educational environment within the United States. Drawing from previous research conducted in a graduate course exploring language, literacy and culture, the author articulates three practices that teacher educators and researchers can attend to in order to maintain complex explorations of culture with preservice and inservice teachers. These practices are (1) fostering a discursive view of culture, (2) attending to localized knowledge and (3) acknowledging and developing empathic stances. While examples are drawn from a US context, educational and multicultural concerns addressed are global in implication.